


when the dust settles (and all we are is all we have left)

by pentagrammed



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, But we'll get there, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Daemons, M/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, i love one (1) bucky barnes, tragic lack of sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 05:23:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14826128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentagrammed/pseuds/pentagrammed
Summary: In the 21st century, Casta was what the Smithsonian Museum called a ‘Beagle/Labrador’ mix, though they had always referred to her casually as a mutt. That wasn’t the right word for it anymore. And Mina was a Harris’ Hawk, with sharp eyes and talons and the power in her slight frame to fly anywhere.The four of them had been inseparable, had been mistaken for each other, had grown with each other. Steve knew Casta and Bucky as well as he did Mina. They might have, at the time, been the same one person and one daemon existing separately. They knew and cared so little about Dust, and the mechanical working of the world, but if they had known more they might have said that they knew each other like atoms split into fourths that had blossomed into four synced beings.





	when the dust settles (and all we are is all we have left)

_2011: NEW YORK CITY_

 

When Steve Rogers woke from his seventy years of frozen sleep, the first impulse he had was to reach for Wilhelmina. Like an itch that had woken him from any regular night, the urge to hold her tight was instinctual.

The feeling that settled through him as he came back to himself was cold – nothing else but the nerve memory of freezing, and having every atom in his body and Mina’s – different atoms as they were – slow to a stop.

He didn’t quite remember what had happened, no, his brain was still reconnecting, recalibrating, but the familiar motion of curling his daemon into his arms, against his ribs, was natural in every moment. Maybe it was because this was how they had died, and he had spent those decades holding her like always, that when he woke and she wasn’t in his arms, he was cold first, and then he was frightened.

He started to open his eyes, when she fluttered down to him from another point in the room. She must have been awake longer, quicker to warm back to life for her size or her composition of Dust.

“Pretend to sleep,” Mina said softly. “Something is wrong. I don’t know what yet.”

He obeyed immediately, body tense but the way his hawk daemon nuzzled against his breast was at the least, real enough to calm him. A radio in the room played a baseball game and he focused his attention to it.

“We saw that game,” he breathed out, trying not to move his mouth. “We were there.”

“They’ve been repeating it until you woke,” Mina said. “I think they think I’m confused, or drugged.”

“Hydra?” He asked.

“Probably. But to what goal?”

“We have each other. We aren’t tied. We can get out of this,” he assured her.

Of course, it couldn’t be something so simple as a kidnapping. A nurse with a timid lizard daemon crept into the room, the daemon tucked into her pocket like a mouse, but when Steve addressed her lies, the lizard daemon snarled and deployed a warning crest around its neck. The nurse tried to calm the daemon, calm Steve, but he was done with this. Mina cawed furiously, flexing her talons and snapping her beak aggressively. Before the nurse who wasn’t a nurse had time to restrain them again, they burst through the wall of the room into a strange warehouse – confirming their theory that they were being held against their will.

But the two fell silent, overtaken by dismay and sorrow after they had broken out into the new, future world. Around them were these massive screens with moving pictures, flashing lights, the cars that drove by were sleek and unusual. The road was wide and populated with the fast cars that honked at him and Mina. People and their daemons stopped to stare at Steve. There were so many unusual daemons, forms he hadn’t seen before or forms that had been looked down on when he had been in New York – and he was in New York, wasn’t he? It was similar enough but he couldn’t place what had happened, couldn’t understand where he was and why it was like this.

Mina croaked softly, distressed, and shook her wings out quickly. He hushed her, looking around, and it was then that he saw the man in the trenchcoat with an eyepatch adorning his face and the large, commanding jaguar daemon at his side.

 

* * *

 

 

_1943: SOMEWHERE IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE_

 

Of all the memories they had from the nights the Commandos spent camping out in the French woods, making their way from Hydra base to Hydra base, there was one that stuck to Steve’s thoughts like an itch. Mina remembered it as well as he did, and it had been in their heads more and more often lately.

The whole team had been settled around a low-lit fire before they settled in for the night, tents surrounding them, and equipment stored carefully in the camp a distance from their flames. Peggy and Rheese had returned to the base days before, and their presence was missed sorely by Steve and Mina. But at least they were with Bucky again. It had been months since they rescued him from Zola, months since Bucky had vowed to follow Steve into the jaws of Hydra as one of the Howling Commandos.

It had been Dum-Dum, he remembered, to make the joke about Bucky and Casta, asking: “Why ain’t she something with better eyesight, Barnes? What kinda sniper shoots with a dog’s eyes?” It was the kind of distasteful ribbing that occurred between soldiers of close regiments, daemon jokes and sex jokes and body fluid jokes.

While it was true that Casta wasn’t the most _useful_ form for a sniper’s daemon to take, Steve was the only one who had bristled at the implication. Of course he would. He knew Bucky to his core, the man who remained when the gun was taken out of his hands, who was the one Casta had settled for. But Bucky just laughed and leaned back, letting his daemon jump onto his lap. He didn’t even drop his eyes to the easy target of Dum-Dum’s bulldog. With her poor lungs, short legs and stout body, she got winded easily for a soldier’s daemon.

“Dugan, I see well enough for the both of us. I never miss a shot I can see. But she’s got my six with sounds and smells – wouldn’t you say we’re a perfect pair? She makes up for my weaknesses and I make up for hers,” Bucky said with a swagger. Casta barked out a laugh.

“That’s a hunting dog, anyway,” Gabe said from across the firepit. He nodded at Casta, referring to her breed. She was some sort of Beagle mix, they thought, certainly a mutt, but a beautiful mix. When she had settled, Bucky – and Steve and Mina – had swelled with pride for her. “Better use out here than a lot of soldiers’ daemons. Next time I see a man come to basic with some kind of bug, or a fragile-legged deer, I swear-”

“Now, now,” Steve chuckled. “A daemon’s form has nothing to do with their ability.” Gabe raised his hands in surrender, laughing with Steve, and when Steve looked back to Bucky, he saw a mischievous twinkle in the sniper’s eyes.

“Course, Stevie here,” Bucky started with a drawl. “Has got a bad omen of a form for _Captain America_. Like I said about Casta, she’s got my back. My weaknesses are her strengths. But Stevie’d be a real bad sniper out here – Mina has to cover his eyesight. I’d never want Casta watching out for me, and I’d never want Steve’s bad eyes either; the man is as colorblind as Casta, and as regular blind as a bat daemon. I only trust Mina. She and I see the trouble at its source. We have been keeping that one in shape for only all his life.”

Mina laughed with Bucky, while Steve kicked out at his friend from his seat. His daemon stretched her dark wings out proudly, fluffing her feathers as she winked at Steve. The light of the fire shone back from the russet patches of color on them. She knew there was no harm in the teasing at all.

“You’ve forgotten, Buck,” Steve said, grinning and relaxing, “that I’ve had some changes come over my body recently.”

“Yeah, punk? The rest of us went through those changes _at least_ ten years ago.”

Bucky’s response had the whole team collapsing into laughter, until one by one the Commandos peeled off for bed. Gabe Jones and Jacques Dernier, Gabe with his tabby cat daemon and Jacques with his grizzled badger were the first two to turn in, reminding the remaining Commandos to keep their noise down while they slept. Falsworth, losing a final hand of poker to Morita, let out a few cusses that were echoed by the ferret daemon held in his collar. Dum-Dum’s bulldog started yawning before he did, jowls wide and convincing as she dragged him to bed next, and Morita stayed with Steve and Bucky for a little longer, as his Boreal owl daemon liked to take in the night while she could.

Then it was Steve and Bucky, and they kept quiet with only the fire cackling beside them. They moved closer to each other, because they had always been like magnets and their whole lives were the four of them moving with the pull of the earth. After a half hour, they ended up by each other’s sides, close enough to touch. Bucky took Steve’s hand. Mina held in a little trill at the joy she felt. Casta licked Mina sloppily, tongue over the side of her head, which led to a little rustle between them as they played. Steve squeezed Bucky’s hand tightly, relishing in their palms together and Bucky’s skin like his own. He could feel Mina’s happiness lighting through him, and he almost convinced himself he could feel Casta’s too, oh, he was made of the three of them, Bucky and Mina and Mina and Casta and Bucky and Casta again–

 

* * *

 

 

            _2011: STEVE AND MINA’S MEMORIES_

 

Of course, he thought often of Casta.

How could he mourn Bucky without her? They were one and the same being. She was the first daemon beside Mina that he ever touched, in his sickbed as a child while Bucky and Casta fussed over them. They’d been running a fever then, and Mina had been completely useless, flicking between forms at his side quicker than their temperature rose. She was warm too, so painfully warm and moaning in misery.

Bucky and Casta were horribly worried, and even worse, desperate. Carefully and intentionally, Casta took the form of a stoat and laid her tail over Steve’s forehead to test the warmth. That had stirred them out of their sickness more than the medicine had.

Steve had almost convinced himself it was a fever dream, that he had made up the whole experience in his state because he _wanted_ it as much as he wanted to live. He only knew it was real, that it had happened, thanks to Mina. His own daemon, a wide-eyed lemur in an emboldened moment, days after the sickness passed, crawled up to Bucky slowly to press her nose to his hand.

It was quick, the bare minimum of touch, but an exhilarating wilderness flooded Steve and Mina (and Bucky and Casta too, they imagined) with vivid glee and surprise and a warmth that burned through them hotter than a fever.

And Steve and Mina had been there when Casta settled, the first of the two daemons to stop changing forever. It had came out of nowhere, it seemed, when the daemons played roughly with each other, going back and forth between forms until they stopped suddenly.

“You—” Mina said.

“I did!” Casta exclaimed, barking. Bucky and Steve stared, and Steve was the first of them to break into a smile while Bucky maintained his expression of entirely astonishment. But the dog form was so right for her, and when Bucky became accustomed to it, it felt better than it did when Casta was able to change.

She was a light golden spreading over most of her body, with a form that was a little ganglier than a purebred Beagle. She didn’t have the black coating across her back that was typical of the breed, so Bucky knew she was a mixed dog – something uniquely his. When Mina settled, some months later, the hawk was uniquely Steve’s as well. So few of the people around them had birds of prey daemons perched on their shoulders when they went through their day. It even made the recruiters look twice at him, though never a third time before they stamped his paper with another 4F.

In the 21st century, Casta was what the Smithsonian Museum called a ‘Beagle/Labrador’ mix, though they had always referred to her casually as a mutt. That wasn’t the right word for it anymore. And Mina was a Harris’ Hawk, with sharp eyes and talons and the power in her slight frame to fly anywhere.

The four of them had been inseparable, had been mistaken for each other, had grown with each other. Steve knew Casta and Bucky as well as he did Mina. They might have, at the time, been the same one person and one daemon existing separately. They knew and cared so little about Dust, and the mechanical working of the world, but if they had known more they might have said that they knew each other like atoms split into fourths that had blossomed into four synced beings.

 

* * *

 

 

            _2014: WASHINGTON, D.C. (THE BRIDGE)_

 

The Winter Soldier’s mask came off.

Beside him, a snarling wild dog lunged in the air at Mina. The Winter Soldier’s daemon was a grizzled wolf, with scars over her body and thin flesh through which her ribs protruded. They were thin slabs of bone that barely held the wolf’s frame up as she tried to tear at the hawk in the air.

The Winter Soldier’s mask came off.

Mina shrieked, a long and wild sound of pain.

The Winter Soldier was Bucky – but it couldn’t be, he couldn’t be. He wore Bucky’s face under the soldier’s mask, with dead eyes and a blank expression. He didn’t remember Steve and Mina. Worse, they looked to his side at the strange daemon he had come with. The wolf wasn’t Casta.

 

            _LATER_

 

Bucky got away, and Steve found himself retching on the roof. His stomach churned like someone was gripping Mina with their hands, gloved hands, bared hands, any hands that were foreign to them and squeezing her, but she was perfectly alone by his side, though she flapped her wings in distress.

“It was Bucky,” he choked out to her. His fingers scrabbled at the floor of the roof under him, like he could grasp at some impossible edge on the flat surface of it, but there was nothing there for him to catch on. An asthma attack, he thought in wonder, then corrected, a panic attack.

“I know, I know!” Mina said. “But!”

“But.” Steve echoed.

And he threw up.

 

            _LATER_

 

He knew that the 21st century had come and left him far behind, but this wasn’t part of it. He knew that advances in daemon studies had begun long before he and Mina received the serum and found themselves able to go farther away from each other.

He even knew about the rumors of intercision that were a whispered afterthought in modern human rights affairs, he had seen firsthand the way daemons had evolved since his time, lord, he had seen _Bruce_ , even, but this was new.

 “Natasha,” he said when she caught up to him. “How could that happen? How could it be Bucky without her – But the daemon was his, we would have known if they weren’t together, I don’t understand–”

“You know that Kolya and I are separated?” She asked him. Steve paused. He hadn’t known that. He looked to the black racer daemon, dark and smooth, coiled around Natasha’s collar. “You have seen how Bruce and Stela go into the Hulk?”

That he had – when Bruce changed, his soft-spoken daemon dissolved into the Hulk’s body in a shower of gold Dust. Steve had been horrified when it first happened. And he had spoken to Stela after about the experience; or rather, Mina had because Steve was still uncertain about daemon customs in the new day.

Mina had returned with this strange story: Stela, when Bruce changed, did not cease to exist, but she went to the same place Bruce did when the Hulk surfaced, which was inside the massive green body. Her particles of Dust melted into the green skin, because she was just as much of the creature as Bruce was, and her consciousness integrated with Bruce’s just under Hulk’s skin, where they lay dormant. It was genuinely reassuring, that Bruce was not alone when he ceased to exist with them.

“I have, but–”

“To replace a daemon entirely?” Natasha finished. “That is new to me too. I have seen all manners of injustices to do with daemons. I have seen them separated, touched, tortured, even severed. But not this.” Her hand darted to Kolya and she touched his scales quickly. It was one of the first signs of nervousness or fear Steve had ever seen in her. Kolya’s tongue darted out, tasting the air as snakes did.

“It wasn’t even her, it was changed. It was an entirely new daemon, as if he were a new person. But if he were a new person, what happened to Casta? Is she Dust now?”

“Steve,” she said softly. “We have to stop Project Insight first. We have to save the world. If you can stop Bucky, incapacitate him and the new one in any way, we might be able to get answers. But that isn’t the priority.”

“Pierce is.”

Natasha put her hand on his shoulder. Mina was on his other shoulder, shuffling her claws in his flesh. The two touches steeled him, reminded him that even with Bucky’s loss so fresh in his own heart, he had seventy years of the growth of Hydra to burn away before he could reopen the wound and ask what had happened to Bucky and Casta.

Mina chirped. Kolya shifted his body over Natasha’s skin, pressed against her so intimately no one would ever guess they were seperated. Steve nodded.

“Let’s get Sam. Suit up. Stop Hydra.”

 

* * *

 

 

            _2014: WASHINGTON, D.C. (THE FINAL HELICARRIER)_

 

Steve heard the wolf snarl behind them before he heard Mina cry out in warning. He knew what he would see before he even turned around. In all black, but for the metal arm shining on his left side, stood the Winter Soldier. His hair was longer than Bucky’s had ever been, his face blank and unrecognizing. Steve saw the weapons at his side, in his hands, the stance of the daemon and slid his shield to a more defensive stance as he stared.

Bucky wasn’t wearing the mask he had on in their last encounter. With a start, Steve realized that the mission was to kill him. It wouldn’t matter that he had seen Bucky’s face. Did Pierce know who Bucky was? What this was doing to Steve? It could be one last way to torment him, he thought.

The wolf inhaled in the air, taking in Steve’s scent, and raising her hackles in recognition, or acknowledgement of him.

“Please don’t make me do this,” he said. The wolf bared her teeth. “Bucky, where is Casta?”

The pair remained impassive, not even turning to glance at one another. With a deep sigh, Steve threw the shield. In the back of his head Natasha’s words were ringing. But Mina’s battle cry drowned them out.

As they fought, Steve realized how unlike Bucky the Winter Soldier was, and through Mina, realized how much the new daemon wasn’t Casta. She tore at Mina with every ounce of strength in her body, not holding herself back at all the way Mina and Casta playfought. Steve had to tear his attention away from the daemons, knowing Mina could hold herself in their fight as little as they wanted to hurt Bucky.

The Winter Soldier had no concerns for his wolf daemon, as he ignored them to slash at Steve. For a moment, Steve was able to get away and begin replacing the chip, but Bucky was back on him in a heartbeat and the teeth that wrenched through Mina’s wing a moment later were enough to pull him back into the fight.

Bucky knocked him over, and he knew that Mina was okay as she darted away from the wolf again. The two men fell over the side of the bridge, but the daemons remained. The wolf snapped her jaws at Mina, who was quick to fly out of danger.

The chip had fallen when they had toppled over the railing, and Steve slid across the wing top to reach it, but Bucky was just as fast and the chip fell below them.

“Mina!” Steve called out, and she responded, tearing away from her struggle with the other daemon to snatch it from the air. The wolf lunged past Steve and Bucky, towards the hawk and leapt, uncaring of the emptiness below her. Steve gasped and Mina crowed, but the daemon had landed on another section of the helicarrier and was safe. However, it didn’t look like she’d be able to jump back up to them, and she howled in frustration as Mina returned to Steve out of her reach. With the accuracy of both Sergeant Barnes and the Winter Soldier, the wolf daemon had only missed Mina by a hair, and it was only the assets granted to the hawk by the super soldier serum that allowed her to dodge the wild predator.

With the distraction passed of worrying about the erratic fierceness of the wolf against his Mina, Steve was able to take on the Winter Soldier again. He didn’t go down easily though, and as Mina circled above Steve worked to catch Bucky in a chokehold. It was the only way they could keep him off their backs until they had put the chip in. With Bucky unconscious, and the wolf daemon below, they could buy enough time to stop the helicarriers.

So Bucky fell limp on top of him, and Steve pushed his body off and scrambled to get back to the center of the helicarrier. The wolf was no longer howling, but screaming from below them, pacing back and forth in anger.

“Steve!” Mina shouted.

Pain blossomed through his leg and he grunted. Bucky had recovered much too quickly and shot at him. Maria was on his comm, warning him of the minute remaining and he tried his best to place the chip. Bucky shot at him again, and again. One time, he clipped Mina’s wing and she swore softly, but everything was happening too quickly for them to stop. Then one of the bullets got Steve’s stomach.

It was the worst sensation he had ever felt. He staggered to the floor and felt at his stomach, soaking his hand in the blood that was staining his uniform. Mina flew to him in a hurry, croaking softly and he thought he saw that she was crying. The hawk daemon plucked the chip from his hand and flew it up to the baseboard. In his ear, Maria was counting down and he felt dizzy with terror, but Mina shrieked out to him when she had placed it and he relaxed.

“Charlie loaded.” Steve told Maria. “You have to fire. Mina and I will get off just fine.”

He stood up in a haze, but he had Mina with him to nudge him in the right direction, pushing him towards the railing. The helicarrier had begun to implode around them, with pieces of the structure combusting and falling as they moved.

“There!” She yelled to him. Below they could see Bucky, trapped under some of the debris. “We have to help him.” The Winter Soldier was struggling with the weight on him, as the metal arm didn’t seem to be enough to lift the steel away.

It didn’t even need to be said, because Steve was jumping down to move the beam off of Bucky before she was finished. She flew with him, unable to help him lift it but flapping her wings nervously as he pushed it into the air. The Winter Soldier struggled out from underneath it, growling. Then Steve realized the sound wasn’t the soldier at all. The wolf had found her way back to him, likely climbing up another area of the helicarrier so she could die with her person.

“You know me,” he said.

“No I don’t!” Bucky yelled, and hit Steve with all of his might. Steve was shoved halfway across the glass panel.

“Bucky,” he tried again. “You’ve known us your whole life.”

Bucky hit him again.

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes,” he said. He hesitated for half a second, with a look at the wolf daemon, but said “Your daemon’s name is Casta. When I knew her, she was a small dog like a Beagle.”

“Shut up!” The other man roared. The wolf held back from them, and whined.

Bucky hit him, knocking the cowl off his face this time. Maybe that was the key. Maybe if Bucky saw Steve Rogers and Mina instead of Captain America, he would–

“I’m not gonna fight you.” The shield fell from his hand, clanging against the metal beams of the helicarrier as it dropped. He didn’t care where it went. “You’re my friend.”

This time, Bucky lunged at him, knocking Steve onto his back. “You’re my mission,” he told Steve. The wolf was hanging back, allowing for Mina to stumble up to Steve. Bucky was laying into him, fist heavy against Steve’s face and Mina was crying for him, trying to get between him and Bucky without being touched but also trying to curl up onto Steve’s breast to comfort him. “You’re my mission!” He yelled.

“Then finish it!” Mina cried out. “Because–”

“I’m with you,” Steve finished. “To the end of the line.”

With a dawning look of horror on his face, Bucky froze. The wolf shrieked in the back, an awful noise, and darted forward but then Steve was falling _falling_ _f a l l i n g and—_

 

* * *

 

 

            _2014: WASHINGTON, D.C. (RIVERSIDE)_

 

When he woke, Mina was clutched to his heart, nuzzling into his chest like she’d strayed too far from him. Her feathers were soaked, and he was soaked, and the shield by his side was drying a little faster but still bore water droplets on the vibranium and he knew that Bucky was the one who had pulled them from the water; man and bird and shield together.

Would they have died if not for the Winter Soldier? Steve and Mina and the Captain, drowned in the river all in one go.

Mina shivered against him.

“I spoke to her when she pulled me out of the water,” she said.

“And?”

“She isn’t Casta. But she’s his,” Mina told him. “And this – she said to him, ‘They know about the little dog.’ Weird, right, Steve?”

“Maybe they’re remembering Casta,” he said. “But what about her? Her death?”

“I don’t know.” She nudged his face with her beak. “We have to get back to Sam and Natasha. They’ll help us.”

With a soreness in his body he hadn’t known since the invasion in New York, he got to his feet. He could already feel the tissue in his stomach knotting back together, healing the impossible wound in his belly. Mina hopped up to his shoulder, taking her place there as he collected the shield and stood tall again.

 

* * *

 

 

            _2014: ALONG A HIGHWAY IN THE MIDWEST_

 

A few months later, he and Sam were alone together in a rented car with a fake license plate and no remarkable features. The back seat alone had enough arms and dangerous oddities to raise concern, while the trunk housed Sam’s wings and Steve’s uniform and shield.

Mina and Amity flew over the car, enjoying the sunshine on their wings. Amity couldn’t go as far away as Mina could, so the pair kept close to the roof and darted away only as far as the Eleanora’s falcon could manage.

“The next base?” Sam asked.

“West,” Steve answered. “Taking the same highway as before.”

He was only a little sure what state they were in at this point, but Sam was driving, and Steve was handed a map with little marks on them to navigate because they couldn’t program the Garmin to direct them to hidden Hydra bases. The map had come from Natasha, courtesy of Maria, courtesy of Nick, who just wanted to see some progress in the removal of Hydra. But as Sam and Steve went base to base, they were looking for more details on the Winter Soldier.

Bucky had been spotted, even, at the Smithsonian museum looking at the Captain America exhibit. Steve felt a lump in his throat as he thought of his friend staring down the wall with his and Casta’s face on it, the wolf raising her hackles beside him anxiously at a past she wasn’t part of. They still didn’t know where she had come from, and while Steve had lain these questions before Bruce, the scientist hadn’t had much to offer. Steve could only share so much of the story with him anyway.

“Hey,” Sam said, turning his gaze from the road. “We’ll figure it out. Bring your boy’s shiny ass home and get him help.” Sam’s stare was kind but searching, and in the air above them the daemons were silent. Steve ducked his head away shyly.

“Yeah,” he breathed out. “Yeah, and we’ll get our answers.”

Sam’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen briefly before connecting it to the car’s Bluetooth.

“Hey Natasha,” he said.

“ _Wilson. Rogers._ ” They heard through the line. “ _Steve, is your phone dead or are you ignoring my calls?_ ”

“Oh,” he said, and checked his own phone – a monstrosity courtesy of Stark, who had thought it a wild joke to childproof most of the settings. “The sound was off. Sorry, Nat.”

 _“How goes it in the safari, my hunter boys?”_ She asked. _“Catch of the day?”_

“Mostly a whole lotta dust in our nets,” Sam joked. “How goes it in the new identity business?”

She made a noise that sounded neither content or annoyed, and Kolya laughed. _“You know, instead of building a new cover for an organization that doesn’t exist, I thought I might go through the Hydra info dumps to provide you a hand. Kolya and I made a whole map of the states and color coded the bases and everything.”_

“And you found something for us,” Steve said, already understanding. There were twin thuds on the roof, the sound of two curious daemons coming to listen to Natasha’s tinny voice on the phone.

“ _I figured out the pattern,_ ” Natasha said. “ _Thought you might want to know. I’ll meet you in a few hours. We can beat him to the next base, which we need to do because this is the last that fits his targets, and I think he’ll change his route when he’s taken out this one._ ”

“What was he doing?” Steve asked. There was a lull, barely noticeable to anyone who didn’t know Natasha, but they did, and they know she was choosing her words with care.

“ _The bases he’s surfaced at had one thing in common,_ ” she said.

“ _Daemons,_ ” Kolya hissed.

“ _They all had equipment and files for experimentation with Dust and daemons. Some of them were intercision-focused. If Casta was cut away—_ ” She trailed off.

“Then the bond can’t be fixed,” Steve said grimly. “But she could be alive.”

“ _Is Mina sure that the wolf wasn’t Casta?_ ” Natasha asked. “ _I don’t… I know a lot about these things but I don’t know how they would have transplanted another daemon onto Barnes. These Hydra bases kept the nature of their experiments tight. There was little in their daemonology that might pertain to what they did to him in the information I dumped._ ”

She didn’t need to mention that because they were stuck in a cycle of following Bucky’s footsteps, they only knew about the bases once the Winter Soldier had gone and destroyed them. Paper files and isolated computer systems were imploded in the process, so only Bucky – the Soldier – would know what information the bases had held.

“We’re sure,” he answered her first question. And knowing the things he knew about Natasha now, and Hydra and the Red Room and daemon science in the 21st century, it unnerved him even more that she was so unsettled by the thought of Bucky’s situation.

“ _Wilson, I’m redirecting you to Montana._ ”

“That’s gonna take some time, Widow,” Sam said.

“ _I would pick you up in something faster, but we’d need to hide the Quinjet so we wouldn’t scare Barnes away when he saw it. And we’d need to get the Quinjet from Stark,_ ” she said, and they could hear the disdain in her voice as she mentioned Tony.

“That’s okay,” Steve chuckled. “We’ll take turns driving and sleeping. Meet you there?”

“ _Yeah, I should get there first,_ ” she said. “ _I don’t know when he’s going to strike, but I think we have a little room for travel. It was only a few days ago he was in Nola, and since we know he was wounded there, we can hope he’ll take some time to heal before starting out._ ”

“Even though he’s got the serum,” Sam mentioned. “And heals faster.” The three had spent a lot of time going over the Winter Soldier files.

“If we speed, we can be there in under a day,” Steve said.

“ _Captain!_ ” Natasha joked. “ _How unamerican! Call me when you arrive._ ” She hung up with a click.

Even though Steve knew that he would be a better fighter, a better strategist, a better leader, if he got some sleep, he found himself tossing in the passenger seat while Sam drove anyway. Amity and Mina had rejoined them on one of their stops, when the daemons had tired of darting around the sky after the car, and Mina was settled on Steve’s lap. She was just as anxious but composed herself majestically. Steve found his hand drifting to her feathers constantly, stroking them gently and thinking of Casta.

At the very least, he felt warmer and warmer as they drove – like strings of Dust that had been intertwined between him and Mina and Casta and Bucky their entire lives were pulling them back towards a reunion, a resolution. Steve had felt the same when he stole away in the night to rescue the 107th captives. Yes, he decided, something bigger than him in the universe was setting this right – finally. He felt it in every atom of his being.

 

* * *

 

 

            _LATER, AND MORE TO THE WEST_

They met Natasha at a set of coordinates she sent them. Kolya wasn’t with her, which wasn’t unusual to Steve because he and Mina could go far, but Sam was caught off guard. Steve wondered how far they could separate – he and Mina had tested their own bond to a decent length, but never actually _wanted_ to go far. Natasha and Kolya might not have been allowed that choice.

“Barnes hasn’t arrived yet,” she said. “The base is on the outskirts of town – a factory warehouse with a basement facility you can’t see from outside.”

“Civilians?” Steve asked.

“Not a one. And many of the Hydra technicians have cleared out themselves,” she told them. “Only higher ranked scientists. They must know that Ya- Barnes is on his way.”

“They’ll be getting rid of their research, their files,” Sam said grimly. “Transporting vital equipment somewhere safe. We should go now, if we want answers.”

“Suit up, boys,” Natasha said. She was already in her Widow suit, designed for spying and stealth and subtlety. It was a black that matched the solid color of Kolya’s scales, until her bright Widow Bites around her wrists like cuffs, or a deadly bracelet. Again, like Kolya.

Stark had fixed Sam’s wings after Bucky had destroyed them, and they were better than ever with a special-made alloy of vibranium joints and titanium-magnesium pieces. Sam, after shrugging all of his armor and padding on, flicked the wings out with pride. They were sharp as knives, with some thin plating so Sam could glide, but dangerous to be touched.

And Steve, in the stealth suit he was so fond of, a dark navy that stood out only when Mina came to perch on his shoulder and contrast it with the bright spots of her plumage. The shield, in its place on Steve’s back, was lighter than the hawk daemon. And he went without the cowl, with the tingle of some desperate hope that seeing his face would bring Bucky home to him.

 

            _LATER_

“I think they’ve been expecting us,” Sam said. “It’s been too easy.”

Natasha stayed silent, surveying the room around them. It had been too easy. They were facing the empty grey walls of an empty room that spanned the warehouse basement but held absolutely nothing in it. Not a single chair, a single piece of paper remaining on the floor for them to come across. And barring two security guards from the upper half of the building, both put to sleep kindly and quickly by Natasha’s Widow Bites, they hadn’t seen a soul.

“Enter the building, check. Go down the stairs, check. Arrive in the basement.”

“There’s a sub-basement,” Steve said. He moved to slide the corner of the room, where a false inset had been built. Where the wall slid away, there was an elevator concealed. “Probably control-locked by handprint or facial recognition.”

“Can we pry open the doors and go down the shaft?” Sam asked.

But before they could consider his suggestion, the elevator dinged. The doors opened.

“None of us did that,” Nat said. “That is what I would assume is an invitation.”

“A trap, you mean,” Steve said. Natasha shot him a mischievous grin and walked into the open doors.

“It is fingerprinted,” she said when the men joined her. Rather than a series of buttons on the wall, there was a hand scanner that the Hydra technicians must have used to access the more sinister rooms in their base. The doors closed anyway, once the three of them and the two raptor daemons were with her. It began to descend. “Someone wants us down there. But friend or foe?”

“I don’t think we have any friends here,” Sam said. “Barnes wasn’t here yet, was he?”

Natasha shook her head. They heard a small ding again, and the doors slid open for them.

“Whoever is in the elevator control room overrode it,” She said.

“Kolya?” Mina asked. Natasha shook her head again.

“Getting information somewhere else.”

When the doors slid open, the trio stepped out into an entirely different area, a room more believable as a Hydra base. In front of them was a wide-open laboratory space, void of any human or daemon life. The walls were bare white, and the room was divided into sections by glass paneling and plastic sheets draped from the ceiling to act as walls. The space smelled like chemicals, like every hospital Steve had been in since waking up. Fluorescent lights hanging overhead lit the room, but not all of them worked. In fact, most of them were dimmed.

In the center of the room were lab tables and desks, stacked with files and papers. Natasha darted towards them, curious to see what information they could provide. While she shuffled through them, Steve and Sam began to clear the room.

Steve held the shield forward, careful not to assume they were alone. Sam had the same thought, with his wings in a protective stance to cover him and Amity. The falcon was whispering to him, something about entrance tactics, but Steve didn’t pay them any mind. He swept half the room, but all he was coming across was foreign scientific equipment, and most of the unfamiliarity around it came from it having been destroyed, broken, smashed, and left in pieces.

“The daemon, Steve – her name was Casta?” Natasha asked, breaking the tense quiet that had formed. While she had thumbed through some of the papers on top and slid them to the side for later, this one must have offered something promising. She was holding one of the files open on the table, her index finger holding her place while she looked to him. Mina flew to her.

“Yes, Casta,” she croaked. She bent her head to read what Natasha had found and Steve started towards them, but then–

“Captain America,” a voice said. “And company.”

They spun around to see who it was but didn’t recognize the stranger. He was dressed in a white coat, was thin and balding. The thin-wired glasses he wore did nothing to hide his beady eyes or mask his shifty expression. His toad daemon was in his hands, making furious noises and they knew that it must be due to the explosive device strapped to the man’s chest.

“One of the scientists,” Natasha said, “who didn’t leave. _Stall_.” The last was breathed quieter, only for Sam and Steve and the birds of prey to hear.

“I have headed this lab for over twenty years,” the scientist said. The man was shaking visibly. “I will die before your filthy establishment gets my research.”

“Clearly,” Sam snorted. Amity chirped, laughing. He puffed up angrily.

“I was expecting the soldier,” he said. “As Frankenstein faced his monster, as God cast his son into hell for his betrayal. But with this lab, I destroy it anyway–”

“Uh huh,” Steve said, shifting his shield slightly. “You wanted to take out your creation, blah blah blah.”

The scientist’s eyes narrowed. The toad continued to make noises, and they realized with a start that she was crying, and that when they had assumed that he was simply holding her in his hands, they were wrong. He was restraining her.

“So you’re gonna blow up us and the soldier and all your research?” Natasha asked.

“Man, he probably doesn’t even know who the soldier is,” Sam prodded. “All he knows is that Pierce pointed him towards a man and a dog daemon who’ve been asleep longer than he’s been alive and told him to play mad scientist.”

“I won’t fall into that obvious trap,” the man said. “You must know that I am the expert on the Winter Soldier– when I die, the best source of your answers will too.”

“Doesn’t really sound like you want to die,” Steve said. The toad croaked loudly. “She doesn’t want you to.”

“She knows the sacrifice that Hydra requires of us,” he said, with a cold look towards his daemon.

“The Winter Soldier never agreed to that sacrifice,” Natasha countered.

The scientist switched the daemon into one hand, squeezing her horribly tight and reaching for the button on his chest.

“A shame he is not here to die with you. His death will be momentous, and you will not see it.”

“A shame indeed,” Natasha said, and bared her teeth in a vicious grin. Sam and Steve recognized the look – she had won some kind of victory that had gone unseen to everyone but her. “But you fell into my trap – my web – so long ago you never saw it close around you.”

Kolya chose that moment to drop from the ceiling, into Natasha’s waiting hands. He must have been lounging on one of the long fluorescent lights, and had possibly been there for hours. His dark, thin shape was hard to hide in the whiteness of the room, but Kolya and Natasha were expert spies.

“The explosive was diffused before he even strapped it to his chest,” the snake daemon said.

“Widow!” The scientist hissed. “Witch! That daemon!”

Steve and Sam, who had had no idea what Natasha’s plan was but knew to trust her entirely, broke into twin smiles. Their daemons stretched their wings, not quite relaxing but letting some tension bleed from their feathers.

“He learned the ceiling trick from Clint,” Steve whispered to Sam, because he had seen dramatic Things like that firsthand from the duo.

The scientist fell to his knees, and they saw the beads of sweat that had formed on his forehead glisten under the lights. He began to shake, knowing he had nothing to stand behind. The daemon wrestled herself from his grip and dropped onto the floor, free of his hands and his plan.

But Kolya wasn’t finished yet, and he made his way down Natasha’s body, across the floor, to the toad. The other daemon shivered visibly as he got close and circled her, clearly knowing what kind of power struggle was about to ensue.

Kolya shushed the daemon, a falsely soothing sound, and Steve didn’t know much about snakes but realized that black racers must be constrictor snakes as Kolya began to wrap himself around the toad. The toad sobbed. Kolya, who had only been draped casually over the amphibian, tightened his body.

“You’re hurting us!” The scientist said, hands on his throat. The toad couldn’t breathe, so her person felt the restriction in his own body. Kolya opened his mouth, as if he was casually yawning, but the toad screamed. He wouldn’t – couldn’t – eat her, maybe, not even Steve was sure what Kolya would do, but he imagined for the helpless daemon looking straight down Kolya’s gullet, sharp fangs and all, was enough to make her pee herself.

The black racer snapped his jaw shut, missing her by mere millimeters.

“Why don’t you tell us about the hidden rooms?” Kolya said, turning his attention to the scientist. He flicked his tongue across the toad’s bumpy skin.

“The… the hidden… the hidden rooms,” the man said faintly.

“The floor plan,” Natasha said. “You’re right, Kolya, this isn’t the entire space.”

“I couldn’t get into them,” the snake said. “But I think there are some things of interest in them.”

Steve strode across the floor and lifted the scientist by his neck, pulling him off the floor. The man tried unsuccessfully to gulp for air, but between Steve and Kolya couldn’t quite catch his breath.

“You’ve lost,” he said. “And I’m fairly tempted to let him eat your daemon. I don’t know what will happen, but something tells me he has some experience. I can’t imagine you’d have a great time when we leave and your daemon has to wither away in his stomach while you die here, slowly, as far away from you as we want to go.”

Then he set the man down on his shaky feet.

“Okay,” he said, dazed. “Let her go, I’ll show you.” The scientist stumbled towards one of the farther walls. Natasha cast a last look at the files on the table, not quite wanting to leave them behind.

Mina and Amity both flew down to accompany Kolya and the toad, which certainly didn’t make the prey daemon feel any better.

“Come along,” Kolya chided her. She was still shaking.

The scientist stood against the wall, running his hands over it as if searching for an edge on the wall. When his hands caught on whatever he needed to find, he curled his fingers into an invisible something.

Then he knocked on three separate areas of the wall.

“Rusakov,” he said out loud, then, “Scarlet. Daybreak.”

The wall depressed, moving outwards away from him, and then sliding down to reveal a long hallway. It was dark and grimy, unlike the initial brightness of the first room, which had acted as the third and final cover for their work here.

“Will it stay open?” Sam asked.

“Yes, until someone in the lab reverses the code sequence,” the toad said. Kolya nudged her forward to the scientist, and she eagerly hopped back up to her person, no longer mad at him but in need of his touch and comfort.

There were a number of rooms in the hall. Natasha drew her gun and crept to the first door. She opened it carefully, cleared the room, and lowered the gun quickly. They looked into it from behind her, seeing only a room with filing cabinets and computer databases. The electronics had been destroyed, and the cabinet drawers were flung open and had been emptied.

“The papers in the first room,” Sam said. Natasha nodded.

The next room held the same things, but the cabinets were still full of their files. Natasha huffed. Steve gave her a quick shrug. They would carry all of them out to go through themselves. The sheer amount of research and information that could be weaponized against Hydra was invaluable. But if the Winter Soldier arrived to this bunk with the intention of destroying it like the others, there was no telling what research they could save first.

The third room, only a series of bunked cots for the overnight staff to rest in. There were no personal belongings, and the cots had been stripped of sheets or pillows. It was likely no one had stayed in it for days, and it was even unlikelier that the Winter Soldier had ever been allowed the bare minimum luxury of sleeping there.

Sam opened the next door and gave a quick shout to the rest of them. Amity flew to his shoulder with a start, digging her talons lightly into the armor where her perch was built. She nuzzled against his ear gently.

What Sam had found was a room with the sole purpose of freezing, and then holding the frozen Winter Soldier. Steve pushed into the room with Mina, ignoring the control panels and buttons and flashing lights where the scientists would have controlled the cryogenic chamber, and went straight to the device itself. It wasn’t the first time he had seen one of these, but they were usually destroyed when he and Sam got to them.

He opened it with his brute force, even though there was probably a button that would do that more easily and found what he was looking for: the fingernail scratches on the inside of the door where Bucky had once, twice, a hundred times tried to claw his way to freedom.

Steve clenched his fists. He could feel the anger rising through him, heat and power simmering through his veins like the super-soldier serum.

“Destroy it!” Mina said.

“Be smart,” Natasha said. “We need to study it.”

He ran his own fingernails through the scratched grooves on the metal. There were flecks of freezer-burnt blood in them, more in the scratches from Bucky’s right side where he had torn into it with his own flesh hand.

Steve wanted to be sick. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tear the door off and throw it into the control panels and light the lab on fire. He saw the cufflike iron restraints beside the cryo tank and felt even worse.

“For the wolf,” he said, pointing to them. Not Casta, he told himself, there was only one pair. And they were sized more efficiently for a thick-furred, large wolf than a skinny Beagle mix. “I want Hydra to burn, and I want to pour the gasoline on them.”

Natasha opened the next room.

“It’s worse,” she said. She picked Kolya up from the floor, where he’d been following her, and draped him around her neck.

They had to push open a gate in this room, into a yellow-lit, eerie chamber. The gate had been designed to keep the Soldier in and protect the scientists and technicians from a raging Bucky if he were to question their control.

This room had the chair. Steve, again, went right to it. The restraints for Bucky’s head and hands were worn, like he struggled against it every time. On the side was a mouthguard with Bucky’s teeth imprinted into it. Like the cryo tank, there was blood in the grooves. He could easily imagine Bucky biting into his tongue so hard that his mouth filled with blood, and they made do with the mouthguard to silence and protect him in one.

“Destroy it!” Mina said. This time, Natasha said nothing, only tipping her head towards Steve and Mina.

Steve lifted the shield above his head. _Captain America did this to you_ , he thought, _I am at fault for all your pain_. And he brought it down onto the electronics of the chair. It sent up a spray of sparks, and Mina backpedaled in the air to get away from them. But he wouldn’t stop despite the danger – Mina was safe from the possibility of burned feathers – and Steve was anger and shame and sorrow incarnate. He smashed the chair again. And again. And left it in pieces, finishing with a scream.

“These can never be used against him again,” Steve said, looking at Natasha and Sam. “This technology needed to be destroyed. I don’t care what SHIELD says, I don’t care about research. Bucky will never have to see another one of these again. No one will.”

“We might have been able to use it to reverse-engineer its effects on your boy,” Sam said. “But we’ll find another way. It’s too much. It’s disgusting.” Amity flapped her wings in agreement. Her bright yellow eyes took in the chair with distaste and mistrust. She nodded her head to the corner, for Steve and the others to see the same daemon restraints that had been in the cryogenic chamber room, but these utilized a solid pole to keep the daemon a distance from the wall. When the Winter Soldier was frozen, she likely went to sleep outside the chamber, eternally ageless and in good health by nature of being made of the Dust of a nonaging human. Here, the wolf must have tried to bash herself into the wall and kill them in this room, as Bucky was electrocuted, and she was awake for the entirety of it.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Natasha said queasily. “She must have thought she could kill them both if she tried hard enough.”

“My god, Nat,” Sam said.

The chair and cryo chamber, of course, were not new to them, but they had only ever seen them following their destruction by an enraged and vengeful Winter Soldier. These were functional, and dangerous. These had not experienced the just anger of the Winter Soldier as he burned down Hydra bases. Instead, they were live-wired electric horror, pain and the destruction of anything good running through the electrodes.

Steve took the next room, which was a chemistry lab with pharmaceuticals lining the tops of tables and cabinets and freezers along the wall. Medications and serums and vials of foreign liquids in foreign colors met their eyes. Steve didn’t know what any of them were for, but Natasha read a few of the labels with understanding.

He did, however, recognize the vials of blood in one of the freezers, and knew that this must be a lab for testing and trying to recreate Zola’s serum from Bucky’s blood. Those would be destroyed when they had the time to do so – Steve would ensure it himself that no piece of Bucky remained in Hydra’s hands while he lived and breathed.

“There’s enough sedatives in here to knock out a blue whale,” Sam said, hand hovering over some of the vials. The daemons pulled open some of the drawers, stocked with syringes and capsules and tubing and so much medical equipment Steve didn’t want to consider – especially when Nat held up a feeding tube and dropped it in disgust seconds later.

The final door in the hallway was locked. It was solid steel, foreboding and heavy.

The three of them – Steve, Sam, and Natasha – looked to the scientist, who had meekly trailed along with them while they searched, under the watchful eye of three daemons. He looked nervously at the door, more anxious, they thought, than he had the entire time. His daemon began to whisper furiously into his ear.

“Nope,” Natasha said, popping the word like bubble gum in her mouth. Her gun was in her hand and pointed to his head, and the man barely had a moment to blink before he realized the danger he was in. “Let us in.”

“I…” He wiped at his forehead and sighed. Then took an ID pass from his front pocket and swiped it through the access point. Natasha kept the gun trained on him.

“What’s in here?” She demanded. But the scientist didn’t have time to answer at all, before Steve was pushing through the steel door and going in with Mina perched on his shield.

The lights came on slowly, triggered by his motion. Mina stretched her wings, shaking them out and blinking her eyes to adjust to the light. Then she screamed, and a horrible growling came from the room.

“In!” Sam gasped, shoving the scientist in first and then pushing the man to the ground. And when he and Natasha looked to the room, they saw what had upset Steve and Mina so badly, had sent Steve to his knees on the floor.

Trussed up and closed in a cage that could barely fit a cat comfortably was an enraged, wild-eyed, yowling dog. She was a daemon, clearly, a layer of dirt and dried blood and grime covering her fur and hiding the beautiful gold and white coat they could see in patches. Sam and Natasha knew without doubt that this was the lost Casta, and that Steve and Mina’s hearts were breaking to see her like this. She snapped her teeth at them, jaw wide and dangerous, until they saw the spiked wire around her snout and realized what she was enduring to defend herself.

“Casta,” Steve gasped. “Casta, please, we aren’t here to hurt you. It’s Steve and Mina – we’re here to help you.”

But she didn’t seem to remember them, or maybe doubted their existence, or the possibility of kindness and a rescue. Steve was crying openly, moving towards the cage slowly. He had dropped the shield and his hands were held out for Casta to see that he meant no harm. The daemon didn’t let her wariness drop and pulled her body away to the back of the small cage.

“Can you speak?” Amity asked the daemon. Casta only eyed them warily, not even shaking her head to answer.

“How do we open it?” Mina hissed, turning her head towards their enemy – for there had been no forgiveness for the Hydra scientist before this, but now the hate in their hearts was stirred beyond the previous and the tangible, vile proof of his involvement was here in all her tortured trauma. If the tortured dog wanted to, Mina and the other daemons would help Casta kill him with glee and their people would allow it.

“The lock is designed to keep the Winter Soldier from breaking into it,” the man said. “We open it only with trained combatants armed with electric batons to keep the daemon under control. She will attack you, and escape.” He had gestured to the wall, where the electric batons and what looked like cattle prods were kept, as he spoke.

“Good,” Steve said, followed by a noise that sounded like a sob. “None of us deserve her mercy. She should tear out every one of our throats.”

The dog daemon snapped her teeth, as if in agreement.

Sam moved forward slowly, low to the ground as Steve was, and took a place behind the captain. Amity joined Mina, the two birds dropping to the floor and approaching carefully. Natasha, gun still pointed to the scientist, patted him down for another key.

“Nothing,” she said, disappointed.

“Casta,” Sam said, speaking directly to the daemon. “I know this is unusual, and you have no reason to believe us. We’re here to help you. We want to free you and reunite you with your person – Bucky. James. The soldier.” The daemon howled when he finished, hopefully recognizing the names.

“We will do our best to keep you safe,” Amity said. “You might not remember Steve, but he has come a long way to help you. He’s going to get very close to this cage and see what he can do. If we can open it, we will help untie you. No shocks. No pain. You can go free the moment you want, but we would like it if you stayed with us until we find Bucky and return you.”

“Steve,” Sam prompted. Steve was grateful for his guiding hand, because as touched as Sam was by the atrocity, he could hold his heart together a little better than Steve could.

The super soldier moved close to the bars and lock, shaking slightly. Casta bared her teeth as he got closer but was no longer growling. Steve took the lock in his hand, testing the metal. It was adamantium, he recognized, but he felt it for weak spots anyway, taking note of the thinner areas. Then he crushed it in his hands, using all his strength to ruin the shape of it. When the lock was more malleable, he pulled it with all of his force. Instead of the lock by itself, he did pull some of the bars out of place, and with a final sharp tug, broke the bars out. The door swung open.

Casta lunged, but she was still tied tightly so the most movement she could manage was to fall out of the cage and onto the ground. Steve twisted his body away instinctively, so they wouldn’t touch, but he knew that the ropes needed to come off before anything else.

She was mostly tied by barbed wires, wrapping her front paws together, her back paws together, her snout closed, her tail to her back legs, and excessive wire wrapping the rest of her body not to restrain the daemon, but to cause her pain. The wire wouldn’t be cut easily, certainly not with Mina’s beak or claws like Steve had hoped.

“Knife?” He said, and Natasha tossed one of hers to him. Casta bristled. “Casta, I am going to cut the wires from your limbs. I am sorry that I’ll have to touch you. But,” and his eyes darted to his teammates quickly, guiltily, before he said, “I have touched you before, with your permission. I know it doesn’t still hold now, but I think if you could remember that time you would be willing now.”

He moved his hand to the wire around her mouth, careful to keep his fingers as light as possible as he pulled some of it away from her. She whimpered softly, so only he could hear, and he sliced through it quickly, pulling his hands away immediately after.

“Okay?” He asked. She didn’t say anything, but looked at him the same way Bucky had on the bridge when Steve had first called his name – like something was dawning on her, but hadn’t quite broken through. Steve could work with that.

He cut away the rest of them, feeling every brush of his skin against Casta’s fur as if it were a bolt of lightning striking him. And he was horrified to see that where he pulled away the wires, there was deep scarring left behind on her body. When she was free, the daemon struggled upwards and onto her paws, trying to hobble anywhere. But her legs, weak and unused to movement, gave out under her and she fell with a yelp.

Steve cried. Sam wore a look of pain clear on his face, and Natasha let out a sad sigh. Her finger itched towards the trigger of her gun, like she wanted now to be done with the horrible man she had it pointed towards. He had no remorse on his face, his daemon turned from the sight like she could pretend they hadn’t destroyed a man and his daemon like they had.

“We’re gonna help you, Casta,” Mina said. She was by the dog’s side immediately, propping her up again. “We won’t let them touch you again.”

The scientist let out a harsh laugh. Then he fell forward suddenly, onto the ground, bleeding from his head. He fell onto his side, so they could see the bullet hole through his forehead. The toad disappeared in a cloud of Dust that fell slowly, dissipating into the air in seconds.

“Nat!” Steve said, surprised. But the Widow was already raising her gun away, one hand in the air, just as concerned.

“I don’t have a silencer on mine,” she said. “You would have heard me shoot him.”

They all knew who they would see when they turned to the door, and they weren’t disappointed. In the steel frame stood Bucky, dressed in tactical gear up to his neck and his hair tied back messily. By his side, and coming up to his hip in her threatening stance, was the wolf daemon. She looked at the group as aggressively as she could muster, and barked out a rough sound at Casta.

The dog daemon struggled to hold herself up and step towards them. Her whine caught in her throat, and Steve felt the urge to scoop her up in his arms and take her to Bucky himself. Bucky – the Soldier – whichever one stood at the door – was watching Casta with a desperate expression.

“Where will you go now?” Steve asked. “I wish you would come with us.”

“Cut one head off, two more will grow back,” the wolf growled.

“So you’ll spend your lives trying to take Hydra down – like this?”

“We’ve recently learned that life isn’t nearly as temporary a condition for us as we once thought,” Bucky said. “I’m here to take the dog with me, to hide her. Hide them both.” The wolf looked up at him suddenly, confused. The Soldier put his hand on her scruff.

“No–” she started, but he shook his head.

“They won’t be used against me again.”

“How did that happen?” Natasha asked. Kolya was unnervingly still on her shoulders, taking in the man and wolf. “Two daemons, it’s unheard of.”

The Soldier shrugged. A piece of his hair, silky with oil, fell from the collected strands of it. The arm whirred, a quiet hum in the room.

“If you come with us, we can help you get your answers. All of them,” Sam offered. “Not just what created your other daemon, but the memories they have taken from you. Your life as James Barnes, your missions as Hydra’s asset. Everything you have ever wondered about.”

“Do you have a name?” Amity asked suddenly, tilting her head. She was asking about the wolf daemon, who looked up at Bucky again.

“The Asset,” he said. “We have only ever been the Asset. The Soldier.”

“This is Casta,” Mina said, still by the Beagle’s side. “Casta, and Steve and I were there when she first settled. But you know her name, you went to the museum. You have one named daemon, we can find a name for your other.”

“Casta,” Bucky said, suddenly reminded of the dog. He knelt down, and hesitating strangely, patted his knee for her. It was a move that belonged entirely to Bucky Barnes, never the Winter Soldier, to call for his daemon like that. And when she hobbled towards him, he gazed at her in wonder.

“She hasn’t spoken to us,” Steve said. “She used to talk all the time. But it’s okay if she won’t now.”

Casta toppled into Bucky’s hold, wiggling happily on his lap. The wolf daemon tucked her head towards the pair, licking Casta’s head gently. Bucky was hesitant at first, to stroke her, as if a Hydra technician would come towards Casta with a cattle prod again if he showed her affection, but as Steve, Sam, and Nat held still, he grew more confident in touching her.

“I have been searching for her longer than I even knew I needed to,” he said. “As complete as the Winter Soldier could be with his daemon at his side, the man who was Bucky Barnes still exists enough in us to feel her absence.” Sam sucked in a sharp breath at that, one that Steve and Bucky could hear.

“Come home with us,” Steve said. “Learn her again in peace. Let us protect you while you heal.”

Bucky stood up, cradling Casta in his arms. He shifted her until she was comfortable, with her legs dangling freely but her body supported by the metal arm easily. Bucky had never holstered his gun, and it hung from his right hand. The wolf turned to the door.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. But you should leave before this place goes up. I have already set its destruction in motion.”

Natasha made a scandalized noise, remembering the research they had intended to carry out with them. The first purpose of this mission had been for intel, and if Bucky walked away and the lab burned, they would have nothing all over again.

As if cued by Bucky’s words, a soft boom went off down the hall. They all flinched. Bucky slipped out the frame of the door, and Steve scrambled after him, Mina quick at his shoulder. The second room was already visibly alight, with the papers in it providing for easy kindling. He heard Nat and Sam behind him, leaving the final chamber and the dead man in it behind.

“Let me come with you,” Steve said suddenly. “Let me help you destroy Hydra. Fuck being Captain America, I’ll come with you and protect your daemons and hold you in the night and shield you from harm. I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. I’m with you until the end of the line.”

Mina cawed in agreement. Sam and Natasha would never allow it, but they didn’t care anymore, this was always their choice, Bucky would always be first.

The wolf and the dog and the soldier all looked at them. Steve saw the same recognition in Bucky’s eyes that he had on the helicarrier, but this time it didn’t come as a dawning realization. Instead, he saw it expressed as a sad understanding, and he knew that Bucky wouldn’t let him come.

“Please,” he said. “I have nothing in this world but you and Casta and Mina, and you now,” he directed at the wolf, “and I want to be with you again.”

The three of them almost looked like they would accept his offer. Smoke filled the hallway they all stood in, and Steve didn’t dare look at his teammates. The wolf was the first one to break, huffing softly.

“Steve,” Natasha said softly. “You can’t.”

He turned to look at her, and Sam, for what he knew wouldn’t be the last time, but would certainly be a while. He took in her bright hair, that was long enough to brush against Kolya where he lay, and the wisdom beyond years in their eyes. He looked to Sam’s easy expression, so warm and kind, the incredible suit that he bore and the way the wings mimicked Amity’s beautiful feather pattern.

“I came back to life for this,” Steve finally answered her. “I was resurrected to go with him. I’m sorry.”

But he turned back, and his heart sunk into the soles of his feet, like once over seventy years prior he had sunk into the Atlantic Ocean with Mina clutched at his breast, and his heart sunk like that because when he had turned away, Bucky and Casta and the wolf had disappeared into the smoke.

**Author's Note:**

> aaaand i finally finished this! was aiming for my birthday last tuesday but missed it a bit, whoops. there was a ninety percent chance this would end happily and then i went for a little more pain instead, so uh, whoops x 2.
> 
> this fic is operating under the idea that the winter soldier is a dissociated identity of bucky barnes, created to help him survive hydra, but because of the enhancements and experimenting that had already been done on him and continued after his second capture, this other identity was able to form a daemon itself. thus, the wolf. but casta is still in existence because bucky barnes is still, in some form, there. both of the daemons are permanent after their conception.
> 
> first person to photoshop that 'gee, how come your mom lets you have two weiners!' into a 'gee bucky, how come the author lets you have two daemons!' wins the prize of my eternal love


End file.
